Carolyn Brook Ibberson
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Microbiology & Immunology
Microbes rarely live alone. In and on the human body, many species share the same space, and the way they feed, compete and cooperate determines what the whole community does, including whether an infection persists.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
polymicrobial communities
microbe-microbe interactions
chronic wounds
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Map the three-dimensional metabolic landscape of polymicrobial chronic wound communities at micron scale, combining confocal imaging, imaging mass spectrometry and spatial metatranscriptomics with the team's computational pipeline.
- Determine how the nutritional landscape and spatial arrangement of wound microbes shift when community composition or the host environment changes.
- Define how changes in nutrient availability, caused by community makeup and host nutritional status, alter microbial metabolism, cooperation and competition, using -omic and genetic approaches.
More about the research
These interactions depend on what each microbe eats and produces and on how close the microbes sit to one another. Yet the basic rules of these interactions, and the distances over which they operate, remain largely unknown. This holds at every scale, from a whole tissue down to single microns and individual chemicals.
Why it matters
Communities of interacting microbes, such as those in chronic wounds, shape human health, but there are few ways to steer them. A molecular blueprint of how microbes in these communities share nutrients, cooperate and compete could reveal new strategies to change how a community behaves. Such strategies may eventually help with persistent polymicrobial infections like those in chronic wounds.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sujit Datta
California Institute of Technology, CA·Biophysics·Early-career
Evaluate how mucin glycans, the sugar chains attached to the proteins forming mucus, select for particular microbes within natural microbial communities.
Sharon Bewick
Clemson University, SC·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether genetically identical parthenogenetic whiptail lizards (Aspidoscelis) show less individual-to-individual variation in gut and skin microbiota than their sexually reproducing, genetically diverse parent species, using 16S rRNA gene sequencing.
Darcy McRose
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify redox-active metabolites (electron-shuttling small molecules) made natively in soils and map which ones are produced together across root-associated microbial communities, using newly developed screens.
The school
University of Tennessee-Knoxville: 16 labs on PI Pages, $387M a year on research, 426 research doctorates a year.
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